The end result of losing your nationhood is the same no matter how nicely or cruelly it is done. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has put the experience into words...

No nation - the poetry of the future

WORKERS, JAN 2005 ISSUE

SO MUCH of our culture is linked to the stability and peace of being a nation without outside military incursion, let alone massacre and theft of land, that we find genuine nationalism hard to understand. We hate the American sort and we know little of the genuine attempts from Ireland to South Africa to Palestine to Cuba to create it. So British people will struggle badly as they are being deprived of their nation. They may turn in civil war upon themselves before this matter is resolved. The existing political order will be immeasurably damaged.

Invaders
We have warded off invaders for a very long time. But more than that we have allowed British capital to take away nationhood throughout the world. Now the United States has adopted this role of nation stealer. They need Britain because our armed and secret services have such rich experience in fomenting division. To complement this, under the influence of the EU, Blair's Britain seeks to create chauvinist identities around regions like Scotland and Wales and also to feign an involvement in six counties of Ireland while the 26 are in hock to the United States.

Fortunately the people of the North East of England, previously electors of the worst of pro-EU has-beens like Mandelson, Byers, Blair and Milburn, saw through the ploy and voted down the proposed regional assembly. But even they may not appreciate what loss of nation is really like.

In the extremity of the situation now, where a Labour government is seeking on the one hand to obey the United States and on the other to put Britain under the control of the European Union, we have to consider various expressions of nationalism in history. We have to look at the other end of the spectrum even to begin to imagine the problems and prepare ourselves for the potentially devastating losses of confidence and homes.

We have not been bombed since the Second World War, except by tin pot terrorists, and not lost land since the Roman invasion. As a nation, we are, however, losing control of the economy, manufacturing, natural reserves, fishing, agriculture and utilities, though sadly this fact does not yet seem to be affecting the outlook of sufficient numbers of people. By signing up to the EU constitution we will lose our independent national status. But signing up, or not signing up is so dignified: it hardly touches the experience of seeing your children killed in front of you because you want a nation, somewhere to live in peace and work.

Palestinian families leaving behind their homes, olive trees and planted fields in Al-Faluja Village, 1948.

Loss of nationhood
But the end result of losing your nationhood is the same no matter how nicely or cruelly it is done. So it is worth the time to read about the experiences of those who have written about it.

Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, provides a good start. He expresses feelings and concepts that in Britain we probably find difficult to imagine. Reaching out to understand his poetry provides an insight into what would be in store for us.

Darwish's place of birth, a village called Birwe, was obliterated. Every effort imaginable was expended on obliterating Palestine. His first poem, addressed to a Jewish boy and written at the age of 8, had the lines: You can play in the sun as you please, and have your toys, but I cannot. So incendiary were the words that he and his family were chastised by the Israeli military.

This began years of jail, exile and persecution. His crime was always the same: reading poetry or travelling without a permit. He began a life abroad translating for communist papers, studying in Moscow and setting up journals in Paris and elsewhere. Returning to Ramallah in 1996 he published his twentieth collection of poetry in 2000.

Throughout he was a stylistic, classical, musical, powerful and popular poet, loved and recited by the Palestinians. His sense of loss haunts the world. He identifies with the hidden hands of destroyed nations and cultures throughout the world and writes lines, however skilfully translated, beyond the imagination of those who have nonchalantly taken their homelands for granted.

Succulent, fresh, learned, overpowering, sensual, bitter, optimistic — Darwish's works deserve a British audience. He writes of the catalepsy of expropriation:

He expresses the loss of homeland by identifying with the fate of the North American Indians in the past:

    Don't kill the grass any more,
    It possesses a soul in us that could
    Shelter the soul of the earth.

Better than any other poet he describes the effect of national loss on the psyche and history:

    Winds will recite our beginning
    and our end
    Though our present bleeds
    And our days are buried in the ashes
    of legend.

Simple words in his poems say so much. 'Goodbye to our history' is a throw away line that you find yourself returning to. Without his land and nation he is permanently exiled and living in the illusion of a past that has to be so strongly imagined it will recreate a new national future: 'I leave jasmine in a flowerpot, my small heart in my mother's cupboard, I leave my dreams in water, laughing'. In a world in which his nation is lost he constantly records the physical experience of isolation and alienation: "They returned from a tunnel's farthermost end to the closeness of mirrors."

Our homelands make us. Without them we lack place, sense and sanity. The madness infecting Britain and the alienation of our people reflects this developing removal from our own land which poets like Darwish so eloquently and painfully chronicle.

top